Melancholy in A Minor
by MidnightCereal
Summary: Oh my God...I wrote something that children can actually read. One shot.


Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Melancholy in A Minor

By MidnightCereal

"Yui, look over here for a second?"

Grandpa's gleeful inflection won her over. Stealing her gaze from the young couple with the baby stroller, Yui traipsed lightly to her mother's father. Or tried to, at least. The mall was crowded today, packed with bigger, older people, teenage groupie cliques, matched pairs discreetly arguing about things Yui should have been too young to understand, and lone sharks patrolling the promenade with flat mouths. All of them seemed unhappy to her. None of them knew how to say 'excuse me'.

He was smiling down at her when she finally made it to the display window he had been staring into. Yui's mouth flopped with polite indifference. "It's just a Famicom, Grandpa."

"Hey…" he started with feigned hurt, "I thought all you young people liked video games! I would've thought your mom would've bought one for you, already. Your dad, for sure."

"They're alright." The girl brushed back of strand of dark chestnut, smiling up at her most favorite person in her eight year-old world. "Video games, I mean."

Yui looked back to it while he was sighing in relief. "Well, thank God you told me they're just 'alright' before I bought it for your birthday. I was _this_ close, Yui-chan."

"I liked your last present."

"Yui…" he admonished with the harshness of a down pillow, "the thing about birthdays is that I'm supposed to buy something for you _every_ year. So how am I spoiling my only grandkid if I get you that fiddle and just leave it at that?"

"It's _not_ a _fiddle_," she almost growled, "it's a Cornerless Baroque Masa Inokuchi violin with a Rosewood fingerboard."

The wrinkles around his eyes crunched together as he struggled to decipher the odd language coming out of his granddaughter's frowning mouth. "It _is_?" he asked stupidly. Yui knew he did it to just drive her up the wall, but she couldn't field the discipline yet to not stomp her foot like…like…well, an eight year-old.

"You know what it is! You just bought it for me last year! You even had it made special, it's thirteen inches long because I have small hands!"

"Ahhh…" He rubbed the back of his grey head.

_What did 'Ahhh' mean? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?_

Then the Ikari girl did something she had learned to do a very short while ago…she let it go. The couple with the baby glided by in the glass reflection. She amended her first assessment…they seemed to be very happy. "I liked it, Grandpa…"

A twinge of nervousness poked her spine when it became obvious he caught the note of melancholy in her light voice. Of course he'd catch it. Eight year-olds weren't melancholy. They were sad. They were upset. Not melancholy.

"Yui?"

"I liked it a lot. If you get me something, get me something to go with it." She tried putting on a child's smile. "I liked it a lot…"

"Checkers was an old dog," he said.

It was moments like this Yui realized it was no use pretending to be an average girl, because it was moments like this Yui realized Uyeda Ikari was not a doddering old man teetering on the edge of senility. Not yet. So it was time to let him know that _The Speech_ was unnecessary. She didn't like _The Speech _when dad gave it to her. She liked it even less when her mother gave it to her. A lot less.

"I know he was," she started. "He was old and he was sick. And it's much better for him now that he's gone, because he was probably hurting. I know. That's just how things are, and I need to get over it."

Grandpa could only blink down at Yui after her clipped espousal. At first, she did not think he would say anything to her.

Then he frowned.

"Your knucklehead parents told you that?"

Wait…what?

For the first time in a good long while, the third-grader felt her age. "I…um…"

"Why do you think you need to get over it, now? How long ago was this? Two weeks ago?"

"I-I just…shouldn't get attached to-OW!" She rubbed the spot on her head that her grandfather half-heartedly thumped.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. Your mom and dad deserved that more than you did. They should know better."

"What more is there to know?" she asked pitifully, her throat itchy with frustration, hating it. "He isn't coming back, so why should I let it bother me so much?"

"So it _is_ bothering you…"

Every ounce of her will went into preventing herself from becoming a pathetic, weepy ball (again) as she digested his words and felt a large, old hand clasp her shoulder and pull her to him.

"You rode that dog like a horse until about two years ago, and Checkers let you do it. We never thought you'd stop trying to eat out of his bowl."

"I didn't _eat_ dog food," Yui stated, her indignation muffled in his thick coat, still cooled from the winter air of the outside. He smelled like wood smoke.

"Only because we always caught you. You were such a slow baby…"

"So I'm not much of an athlete."

"Don't look like that again, Yui, with that face. Like you don't care. You're going to understand that you _have_ to care-"

"I wanted to tell mom to shut up," she said forcefully, and then fell silent.

"Good. That's how you _should_ feel. You want them to come back, and stay with you forever, and make the world perfect so that you're happy all the time. Stay like that. Change when you change. Not when someone tells you to. Or because you want to be grown up."

"I know I'm not a grown up," Yui said. She didn't want to be an adult at the expense of…of becoming her mother. The young girl felt a snatch of bitterness well within her. Again. It was unfair to the woman, said a guilty thing deep down in Yui. It said that dad always got to be good because he never dispensed the bad news. It told her point-blank, that while dad was content with raising his little girl, mom was intent on raising a woman.

Now that she thought about it, that voice sounded a lot like her mother's.

That's what she was to mom: a woman in training. Because mother knew that her daughter was bright and observant and given to absurd growth spurts in maturity. Mother knew that Yui could absorb bad news sooner than she should've been able to.

Yui never hated mother for it. Until now.

The man that had released her and held her hand as they began walking, he understood. Uyeda Ikari was a doctor. His business was making things live and keeping them that way. He probably invented hoping against hope, because he loved life that much. If he hadn't, why had he given her such a beautiful instrument?

She was learning _Largo: Sonata Number Three_ for him. It sounded as if she was killing something at first, but it had been nearly a year since Grandpa had bent over ("Your back, dad," mom had chided) and put it in her thin arms. It lived in her small hands, now, and no one objected to the thriving, shimmering vibrato that cascaded from it, anymore.

In mother's quest to carve a forty year-old from a piece of stone less than a decade old, she had erred; Yui wasn't good at the violin just because she was very smart. The girl understood that being a woman was more than being an adult, a person that got a job and paid bills and told children that their beloved pets were never coming back. It was the power to make life. More than just babies. More than something that would be born and then die. There were a million vibrant shades of hope in between, and she could love her mom that much more if she just realized that.

But it was okay if the woman didn't.

"What's wrong?" he asked when her stare lingered somewhere between his eyes and mouth.

"Nothing. I was just thinking how you'd look if you were purple."

"Oh…" He blinked at that and kind of shrugged. "Well, that's good for you."

End of Melancholy in A-Minor

A/N: Eh...something about Lewis Taylor's 'Melt Away' that tore this out of me. _Normal to Reality _will resume in about three weeks, if I have my way.

Random A/N:N/A modnaR

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


End file.
